07 September 2017

Should everyone in Székely Land speak Romanian?

An anonymous blogger has caused a stir in Romania's social networks with a video that purportedly shows him trying to order sausages in Romanian at a snack bar in the Romanian city of Ordohei Secuiesc, where most of the population speaks Hungarian. Apparently he wasn't served because the stand hadn't yet opened. Nevertheless the fact that many people in Székely Land don't speak Romanian is unacceptable, commentators argue.

It's dumb not to learn Romanian

Regardless of whether the blogger exploited the incident to show the Hungarian minority in a bad light it is unacceptable for Hungarian Romanians not to speak any Romanian at all, the Hungarian-language Romanian daily Krónika admonishes:

“All the Hungarians living in Romania who say it's perfectly okay when a member of the Hungarian minority can't speak the country's official language are wrong. Even if you live in an almost entirely Hungarian-speaking region like Székely Land, the decent thing to do is to learn the language of the majority. In fact that would be very much in the interest of every Hungarian living in Romania, because then provocations like that at the takeaway would come to nothing.”

Hungarian minority needs its own textbooks

Writing on Adevârul's blog portal, historian Marius Diaconescu takes advantage of the incident to call for a reform of language teaching at Romania's schools:

“The sales assistant went to school in Romania. That means she must have written a number of final exams in Romanian. ... The truth, however, is that a lot of cheating goes on with with language tests at Hungarian-language schools. Because neither the school administrators nor the Hungarian school inspectors have any real interest in the Romanian language. Hungarian Romanians should be taught Romanian as a foreign language. Because even if they live in Romania and are Romanian citizens, their mother tongue is Hungarian. ... Consequently Romanian textbooks should be developed with an eye to the needs of Hungarian Romanians and the particularities of the Hungarian language.”